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That's exactly the point. Christianity has a kernel of warlikeness in it, which came to light when some smart Romans realized how to make use of it. A truly inoffensive religion wouldn't be employable in this way. Unfortunately, no such inherently peaceful religions have been discovered yet.

Uh, no, that's the hint that you need. It's irrelevant what happens in the
CDN.

It's actually far from irrelevant. The CDN is the major reason "streaming" services are viable in the first place. Without the CDNs we'd be back in the real streaming era of RealPlayer et al, right before that small company Akamai saw a business opportunity...

You're still going to stream it to your player.

Nope. Your player reads it from a growing file on disk. If you only want to concentrate on that part and call it streaming, then you've already lost the whole transporting across the network part, including controlling what gets streamed while it happens.

If it starts playing
before you finish downloading, you're streaming.

Still incorrect. That's just playing a partially completed file on disk.
It's "streaming" in the most primitive way possible. For example, you can't seek forward and play another part of the media until you've waited for the full file up to that point to be downloaded. True media streaming technologies allow the player to seek forward, *and not get the bits in between*. Basically, the server doesn't send any unnecessary bits, modulo the encoding method.

In your "disk as the media server" analogy, you would want to have some way to access the file randomly - that's only possible when the intermediate data has already been stored.

If you have to wait for the whole file to download before
you can watch, then it's not streaming.

There you go. We seem to be in agreement after all. If you have to wait
for 90% of the whole file to be downloaded before you can seek to the 90% position, then it's not streaming.

There probably are still video
services like that, but I don't know of any.

There's an easy test you can perform to find out: stream a large file (large enough to take some time to download) and right at the start, have your player seek to somewhere near the end. If it starts playing the end straight away, it's probably a streming player, but if you have to wait a while, then it's probably a downloading player.

Whether the video gets downloaded into a buffer in memory or a buffer in a
disk file is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you are
streaming. It only speaks to the issue of how it is done.

Not so. I argue that the difference in technology is sufficiently important to the end user experience that without downloading tech, streaming media business models wouldn't have taken off - as they didn't in the early days when this was tried.

Ultimately, my point is that "streaming" as some of you use the word is a marketing term, useful to give the impression that data arrives on demand into the player and disappears as soon as it has been used, whereas this isn't the reality. True streaming like that is certainly possible and there are servers that do it,
but mostly it's downloading files and hiding them. And I happen to like finding them and maybe processing them in ways that work for me.

No, streaming refers to data being sent on demand without store-and-forward.
For video, it means your server broadcasts UDP packets which your player reads. If the player elects to save the packets in a buffer and delay playing them, that's still streaming. If the player accesses a file on disk, which was independently downloaded using a standard file transfer protocol, that's downloading - even if the player starts showing the data after a short time before the file is fully downloaed.

The distinction is important - streaming is an end-to-end communication directly over the network, whereas downloading can and often does involve middlemen - eg CDNs, proxies, etc. The technology stack for downloading is way more elaborate, advanced and versatile than the technology stack for streaming. The advantage of the latter is that the data is realtime, not delayed.

Bwahaha! Most videos *today* aren't "streaming". I don't watch any videos on youtube or otherwise "live", I always download them, and start watching them with mplayer. Let me tell you a dirty little secret: the videos are files you can download with any browser or command line tool, if you know the correct url. Most services try to hide those urls just to mess with the riffraff.

You can find out the urls by either installing a download extension for your browser, or using an extension that shows the HTTP headers for all the requests your browser does, or in many other ways that get progressively more tedious.

Interestingly enough, real streaming content existed and was unsuccessful before youtube. It existed in the form of an rtsp protocol implemented by a small company called RealMedia. It was unsuccessful because the player was constantly buffering and the picture quality was too low to improve throughput. This was years _before_ youtube.

Video quality on the net improved only when streaming was abandoned in favour of file downloads, because this insulates you from network issues better than on the fly buffering, and it also allows higher resolution and quality tradeoffs in a more continuous way.

Of course the biggest improvement was simply that in the last 15 years most people have had acess to broadband, to the extent that people like you are duped into thinking your downloaded content is "streaming".

One does not have an inherent right to the work of someone else. Such a right
only exists when it is contractually forced by an agreement such as the GPL.

You're building strawmen. All exploitation is based on taking the work or property of someone else without an equitable exchange. And so it is with those who use BSD software to construct their own, proprietary software. The point of the GPL licence is to prevent such exploitation. The point of the BSD is to encourage such exploitation as a way to flood the software landscape with particular implementations. The point of RMS is that the second idea is shortsighted and corrosive to the software community. The point of Apple and other companies who use the BSD as a foundation is to make money and screw the community.

Are you serious? What rights to BSD contributors lose? You list the losses yourself in in your second sentence!

What rights do BSD contributors lose? All the community code exists, the
community can continue without the commercial changes,

I realize you have no clue given the remainder of your argument, so let me spell out your own logical implications for you: BSD contributors do not get to take commercial code and modify it any way they like. The commercial code is locked up and not fully available, nor redistributable. That's what the BSD contributors lose. All they get is to play with their own code, and sit on the sidelines while others modify their code and add bits that can't be taken freely and changed in return.

That's not freedom, that's exploitation. Mind you I have no issue if you like to be exploited, just don't tell others it's freedom when it's really exploitation.

That argument makes little sense. Of course people get paid for their work. The TBP operates in the pipeline _after_ people already got paid. Movies or whatnot don't get made without people getting paid. The carpenters who build sets and models get paid. The costume designers get paid. The extras get paid, the camera people, etc.

It's best to think of piracy as a form of spoilage. The example is harvesting apples. That's a lot of work, and the pickers must get paid, but once the apples are put in storage, some percentage of the apples will spoil. You don't see farmers being ideologically opposed to spoilage, do you? It's not an ideology or an ethical problem. It's a natural part of the lifecycle of apples. There are ways to minimize it, but it gets expensive and often is not worth it.

Media have a lifecycle too. Once enough people got to see them, some people will make copies, using cams or otherwise. With news it's even worse. Once enough people hear about the latest terrorist bombing, they'll paraphrase using their mouths. That's piracy: It's only a matter of numbers, and of probabilities.

Economically in fact, piracy is a good thing just like any form of spoilage. Imagine if you bought 10,000 apples and they never, ever, spoiled? You'd still be eating those apples when you were 80 years old. You'd never have bought another apple in your life. You'd have expensive storage costs over 80 years. The farmer would be out of business already, since after everyone bought a lifetime's worth they wouldn't buy any more. And apple prices would be much higher in a futile bid to compensate.

Same with movies and media. The myth of a piracy free hollywood is a nightmare in disguise. Don't waste your time believing their lies.

I never wanted the linux laptop. The linux desktop was fine the way it was, until Lennart and the merry band of free desktop people turned it into an unusable piece of shit for idiots who don't know the dirrerence between an icon that says "Internet" and the internet itself. Pardon my french.

Because. If you want 10 geniuses in the world, you neet 10,000 also rans. These are people who work hard, and think they could be geniuses but fail. If you want 10 also rans, then you'll get NO geniuses.

It sucks to not make the cut for people, but that's no reason to stop encouraging them to be better than they are. I say, let's push everyone to their limits and let's collect a harvest of talented, hard working individuals in all types of endeavours, who can compete with the geniuses of the past on absolute terms, none of that nurturing feel good bullshit where everyone gets a prize just for trying.